Older, wiser but still having fun

Where did I get it in my head that getting older meant getting more serious & letting go of the little adventures I love most? I'm glad I was wrong.

Maybe I’m the only one who thought this but, as a kid, I looked at adults and thought they weren’t very fun (sorry, mom!). Life seemed so serious with matching silverware, coordinated houses, and jobs you can’t easily play hooky from.

Social media eventually came around and I saw memes and posts along the lines of, ‘adults have the freedom to stay up and eat all the snacks they want but at this point, you want to go to sleep early and stick with a diet.’

It made me feel like that’s what growing up meant: getting older, wiser, and significantly more boring.

A sneaky selfie from last week’s solo trip to Lake Garda

The adults I knew who threw caution to the wind were deemed hippies (and not in a nice way) and that they were lacking *something* adults were supposed to have.

On Sunday I turn 35.

But I still feel quite fun 😅

I like buying things for our home (now that we actually rent a long-term home for the first time ever) but equally like booking random trips without a spreadsheet in sight.

Every year I turned the page to a new age, I always thought, “this is the year I get lame” and maybe I’m biased but I don’t think that’s quite true.

If anything, I’m more sure of what I want and have more money to do said things.

That meme was right though - I don’t love staying up late anymore and do prefer mornings spent outdoors instead of late nights over tequila shots - but more than anything, I like making my own decisions about what “fun” means to me.

And to be clear, if matching silverware, a coordinated house, and a demanding job is your idea of fun, do you. But it’s not mine.

The older I get the more I realize that there are so many definitions of what it means to thrive. And yours doens’t need to look like mine, just like mine likely won’t look like yours.

I’ve never liked fitting into a box. I’ve tried to squeeze myself into quite a few growing up but more than quietly doing as expected, I gravitated to a small group of solid friends I could giggle endlessly over nothing with. Friends that loved random adventures, breaking the rules (again, sorry mom!), and experiencing as much of life as possible.

And growing old has just meant I can do more of that.

I can bounce around countries for no other reason than because I want to live in different places. I can plan last minute trips simply because I’m curious. And I can continue to make it all up as I go and ignore the naysayers who think I’m not doing it right.

Honestly, growing up has been a lot of fun. A lot more fun than I feared. And while I do have the itching feeling that I have to take advantage of what I can while I’m able to do so, it’s been incredible scratching when needed.

I know this feels maybe at odds with my recent post, “Adulting Abroad is Hard,” and I do stand by what I said there: fuck taxes, fuck insurance, and fuck all those little adult things I don’t want to do.

But, to the freedom of building a life I enjoy, that part of growing old is fun.